Vinnie Amico: License To Jam

By Andrew Lentz

Originally published in the March 2012 issue of DRUM! Magazine

Saratoga Springs, a sleepy berg in upstate New York, doesn’t
sound like the most exciting place for a professional musician. But for
Vinnie Amico, on this bitter-cold morning, it’s a slice of heaven.
The moe. drummer (the lowercase-with-period construction of the
band’s name has become too much of an identifier to ignore) is at
home in the middle of the living room waist-deep in cardboard boxes and
paper, piecing together a new kit for the band’s upcoming
tour.

For a split second, though, the 41-year-old is at an impasse. His
setup, something he hasn’t messed with in over a decade, may need
a tweak. “I’m actually reducing my cymbals by two,”
Amico says. “I think I run ten or eleven cymbals and it’s
just way too much. I can get away with having less. Trying to simplify
in my old age, you know?”

Less Is moe.

Blame it on new album What Happened To The LA LAs, a sweet
and sinister slab of inspired party music, for causing Amico to rethink
the kit arrangement. With chunky guitar tones and dog-eared songs that
get to the point, there’s no time for percussive filigree.

Dirtier and more Southern-tinged compared to the last few records,
LA LAs is the first time moe. brought an outsider into the
studio for guidance since Amico joined the band as moe.’s fifth
consecutive drummer (!) back in 1997. If anything you would think the
new album would be more sanitized. “John Travis, our producer, has
worked with Kid Rock, Sugar Ray, and other people,” Amico
explains. “So that’s what gave it more of that kind of rock
feeling.” Though he never says so, having a producer at the helm
freed up Amico to be as loose and gritty as he wanted without obsessing
over the perfect take. Most of LA LAs’ songs were one or
two takes anyway, but the presence of Travis, and his confidence in the
drummer, was a powerful psychological buffer. “I was warming up,
just trying to get different sounds, and within five minutes [Travis]
said, ‘I’m not going to need to use the click,’ so
that made me feel pretty good about what I was doing.”

If click tracks fly in the face of the jam-band spirit, it’s
refreshing to hear Amico admit to their value. “I don’t mind
them,” he says. “But I would prefer not to use them because
stuff can tend to be square. Our songs — the ones that
aren’t as long — need to move a little because if you keep
them too straight or if it doesn’t move up or down a couple of
beats per minute here and there, it tends to feel like it’s
dragging.”

It helped that Amico got to record with his own kit, a condition
seldom granted with commercial producers who tend to have a specific
drum sound in mind. “I have this 14" x 7" steam-bent Noble &
Cooley I’ve been using for years,” he says.
“It’s the biggest, hugest snare drum ever.”

It’s obvious that the Vinnie Amico who first recorded drums
with moe. on Tin Cans And Car Tires in 1998 is not the same drummer on
What Happened To The LA LAs. “I think I put a lot more thought
into the parts,” he says. “Not that they’re any
better, it’s just that it’s more professional. I just
don’t go out like, ‘Hey, here it is!’ It’s like
there’s a little more thought into everything.”

Moe.’s one-time drum set player, Jim Loughlin,
left the band in the mid-1990s. He returned five years later as a
percussionist, and ever since then Amico’s style has become
increasingly sensitive and tasteful. “It’s probably a little
less busy and it’s probably a little more pocket, partially
because I’ve been playing with Jim for 12 or 13 years now, so
it’s not like I’m going to put this part together
that’s going to stomp all over his percussion part.”

The pair not only complement each other, they have a telepathy that
lets them shine individually at the appropriate time, like on the joyous
“The Bones Of Lazarus,” a fan favorite the band has honed
over the years. The recorded version on LA LAs sees Amico’s taut
snare dance around Loughlin’s bell work with pinpoint precision.
“We’ll write a song with a simple part, and if it evolves
into a more complicated, complex drum line or something, then that kind
of comes through playing and not through starting off with a complicated
part and then taking parts away. So it goes in a reverse direction
almost.”

Needless to say, it’s taken the pressure off Amico to be the
proverbial chops-heavy jam-band player. “When I first came into
the band I would be filling every four or every eight bars, and now I
don’t have to do that. In some of the beats I still might be
playing a few more notes — more ghost on the snare or washier
cymbal — but now I can just play a little straighter rather than
some funky cascara,” he says. “Jim might be doing a bell
part over a clave part or something. [The busyness of] what I was doing
before might confuse things or might work against each other rather than
with each other.”

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From Renting It To Owning It

School band is a common rite of passage for drummers and Vinnie Amico
is no exception, picking up the snare drum at age ten. Soon afterward
his mom bought him a drum set, but then “sports kind of got in the
way” of what he thinks might have been a more rapid development.
When not on the diamond or the gridiron, he was at home on the kit until
his mom got home from work. “I wasn’t shedding,” he
says “I didn’t even play to records. I used to have lot of
music in my head so I’d go home and just play.”

Around age 16 or 17, he and several musically inclined friends
gathered in each other’s basements, playing mostly beer- and
weed-fueled covers of Grateful Dead songs. “You got decent at it
because there was a lot of material. There’s improvisation, you
know, and it’s kind of psychedelic, and the higher we got and the
more we played, the cooler it was and the funner it was, so we did a lot
of musical exploration.” As for the herbal use, Amico makes no
apologies for being a teenager. “It kind of went hand in
hand,” he says, “but you learn a lot that way.”

After enrolling at SUNY Buffalo, he decided to study engineering but
then switched to economics and psychology. He joined a band his first
semester and by summer was in another. During junior year he was a
working musician in Buffalo, picking up gigs all over town. “I was
blessed with good time and a good sense of groove,” he explains.
“I’d go play a gig, someone would see me and say,
‘Hey, man. Can you play with us?’”

After graduating, he became a manager at Enterprise Rent-A-Car. Even
with a family to support, he still played out three or four times a week
on top of working 60 hours. Moe., gaining momentum beyond the campus and
burning through a series of drummers, was actively courting him.
“They used to come see one of the bands I played in because we
kind of had a cool little scene thing happening,” he says of the
shows with Acoustic Forum. “It was bluegrass-y but we did a lot of
cover songs and a lot of people would show up, a lot of partying going
on, and so everybody kind of knew me through that.” Each time moe.
would make a drummer change, their manager, Jon Topper, who had been
Amico’s roommate freshman year, would invite him to go on the road
and play with the band, and each time the drummer said no. “I was
on my way to living the dream of Middle America.”

The next time Topper called it was in the middle of touring behind No
Doy, moe.’s first record with Sony/550 Records. “That was a
little more of a serious call,” he remembers. “This was no
longer, ‘Hey, you want to come jump in the van for 60 bucks a week
and peanut butter sandwiches?’ This was a real offer. It was like,
Holy s__t! This is what I have been working toward my whole
life.”

With the offer on the table he had to talk it over with the wife. It
was an event-filled next few days. “It turned out she was pregnant
and I joined the band — all in the same week.” His parents
were not as enthusiastic. Mr. and Mrs. Amico divorced when Vinnie was
still a kid. Amico’s father, Sal, a bebop trumpeter and sometime
drummer, was a major factor behind his son’s early exposure to
music. But Amico Sr. knew firsthand how difficult it was to make a
living as a musician. Vinnie vividly remembers the phone call to his
mother. “I was like, ‘The good news is you’re going be
a grandmother. The bad news is I’m quitting my job and going on
the road with a rock band.’ She was ready to freak: ‘Oh, my
god! He’s going to be addicted to heroin and have no
money,’” he recalls with a laugh. “But it’s a
little different situation than being a jazz drummer. As far as
musicians go it’s been a fairly decent career.

“Actually, it’s been more than fairly decent,” he
continues. “We’ve had a good career. So I’m pretty
psyched about it. It’s tough to stay in a band for 15 years. You
have to fit personally and musically, and I come pretty close in
both.”

Continuing Dead-ucation

Before there was any such thing as jam bands, improvisational music
with any widespread appeal was limited to the Grateful Dead. Even before
the band’s demise in 1995 after the death of Jerry Garcia, a new
generation of bands had picked up on the San Francisco legend’s
improvisational spirit. “All the H.O.R.D.E. bands became jam
bands,” says Amico with a hint of disdain referencing the
’90s-era music festival started by Blues Traveler’s John
Popper that would eventually include acts as disparate as Spin Doctors
and Sheryl Crow. Moe. never participated.

Even after Phishheads replaced Deadheads, the Grateful Dead rhythm
section of Bill Kreutzmann and Mickey Hart continued to insinuate into
various musical entities, including moe., though Amico qualifies it.
“I guess they were sort of influential in my playing, but not
super influential,” he says. “John Bonham was probably my
biggest hero, and he’s probably everybody’s hero. [laughs]
Growing up and really starting to become a drummer it was Neil Peart and
John Bonham. I was listening to Yes so I was into Bill Bruford. Genesis,
too, so I was into Phil Collins and Chester Thompson. Because of my dad,
I was hearing jazz all the time. Philly Joe Jones is probably one of my
favorite drummers of all time. It’s just that the openness of the
Dead’s music is what really drew me in. Garcia’s playing was
super jazzy even though they were playing rock and country
songs.”

After joining moe., one of Amico’s first major outings was
Further Fest in 1997 supporting the Dead, or what was left of it. He has
probably played 20 times with guitarist Bob Weir, who often sits in with
the band, usually at moe.down, an annual summer festival which has
included everyone from punk bands to hip-hop acts. (There’s also a
winter version called snoe.down but it’s on hiatus for 2012 due to
moe.’s headling tour.) He has also played with Dead bassist Phil
Lesh on occasion.

Amico’s taste isn’t shaped by the protocols of a scene,
however, but by talent alone. Like the kind he saw on display last
weekend at a Lyle Lovett show. “Russ Kunkel was playing —
oh, my God,” he gushes. “Lyle’s stuff is really
mellow, slow to mid tempos at most, and everything’s super quiet,
and I mean every single drum part was perfect. That was
enlightening.”

Primus’ Jay Lane, who drums in Weir’s post-Dead project
Rat Dog, is another name that gets dropped. Two of moe.’s early
drummers were total clones of then-Primus drummer Herb Alexander.
(“They probably weren’t the best fit,” Amico recalls.)
When prompted, he speaks admiringly of a certain jam-band drummer hero:
‘I love Fishman’s playing,” he says of Phish’s
stickman. “Very interesting player. He’s definitely an
influence of mine because he was doing such interesting stuff and he
still does. His ideas are different than everyone
else’s.”

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Roots Of His Roots

When DRUM! spoke with Amico a few days later, he was on his way to a
rehearsal with Floodwood, a progressive string band he started with moe.
guitarist Al Schnier at last year’s moe.down. You might say
it’s coming full circle for him from his days hustling in Buffalo
with Acoustic Forum. “We’re both really into roots music and
I was like, ‘There’s no bluegrass band in the
Northeast,’” he says of the project’s genesis before
ticking off names like Yonder Mountain String Band, Leftover Salmon, and
The String Cheese Incident, all of which hail from Boulder, Colorado.
“‘So why don’t we put one together and see what
happens and we’ll have drums in it!’ You put a drummer in
bluegrass and it actually has a decent groove and takes the pressure off
the mandolin and guitar player so I can drive everything and then they
can play a little more.”

Playing a pared-down version of the moe. kit and changing over to
traditional grip for the brushwork and train beats has been the
Floodwood approach so far. In fact, mastering the brushes has become
something of a minor crusade for Amico. “If you can get the bounce
stuff happening really good with the brushes that’s key.
It’s just a real light touch and it’s just a stroke thing,
but I’m really in the beginning stage. I haven’t really sat
down and had a month to just mess with it.”

Amico knows there’s room for improvement in his main gig, too.
Doesn’t matter if no one in moe. requires it of him —
it’s a personal goal. He recently saw Albany, New York–area
instructor Ted McKenzie, an authority on Buddy Rich, for a quick
tune-up. “I need to really get my left hand free,” he says.
“It stiffens up and my bounce rolls get really crappy. I’m
more of a single-stroke player but I would like to play more bounce and
like to have it more even.”

Amico mentions sometime McKenzie student Jason Bittner, who in the
past sought the instructor’s help for tendonitis. Stamina is one
of the things Amico hopes to address before it becomes a problem.
“I could play for hours and hours, but I’d like to feel less
tight when I play for that long. If you saw me, you’d be like,
‘Wow, you play real loose,’ but it doesn’t feel that
way to me.”

Except for deleting a few cymbals, there is no urge to alter the moe.
setup. When the topic of double pedals is brought up (certain players in
the genre, such as Kris Myers from Umphrey’s McGee, use them)
Amico does consider it for a moment. “I probably should venture
out and try a double,” he says. “But with the percussion
player and the way our songs are, there’s not a lot of space for
me to be cranking a double pedal all over the place.And I got enough
John Bonham bouncy pedal stuff happening that I can cheat my way through
the double kick–type stuff.”

Between moe., side projects, open-mikes, and the occasional lessons
he offers, Amico has a working spouse and two kids to look after.
Obviously there isn’t much time for practicing. “Most
professional drummers would be like, ‘What a lazy ass,’
because I don’t sit home and shed,” he says. “We play
long shows; we have two-hour sound checks; it’s like six hours a
day of playing when I’m on the road. So at home, unless I’m
teaching or have side work, then I don’t play.”

Improvise Or Die

While he uses the “J” word freely, Amico’s feelings
about the jam-band label are conflicted. “It’s got its
pluses and minuses,” he says. “It used to be more of
blessing because you went into a genre of music where there’s a
live music crowd. They go to shows, they are very open minded towards
music, and you’d have a fan base of 20,000 to maybe 100,000 people
that you’re automatically plugged into.”

Today the competition is too fierce and the mega festivals are too
many. Radio stations and movie executives are especially averse to the
genre, he adds, bemoaning the loss of one of the few viable revenue
streams left in the brave new world of the cloud. Moe.’s contract
with Sony ended and now they’re with indie label Sugar Hill.
“So it’s like you can’t really get a lot of mainstream
success if you have the ‘jam band’ moniker on you unless
you’re Phish or Dave Matthews.”

Did we mention moe. is a jam band? No need to ask whether Amico
changes up his parts live from what they are on the album. “They
actually want that,” he says of the moe.rons, the informal name
for moe. fans. “If we start sounding too much alike every time,
it’s like, ‘What the hell are these guys doing? Why
aren’t they jamming?’ There’s times when I actually
would like our songs to be shorter. They might even be better, but
we’re going to explore here, so I’m going along for the
ride.”

Complaining a song is too long? That’s the sort of problem most
working drummers — those confined to three-minute pop songs or in
thrall to the music director — would kill for. Amico’s wish
is purely in the interest of preventing fatigue then, right? “No,
it’s just because sometimes we lose a little focus, but we also
can’t push the envelope if we don’t go there,” he
says, crystallizing the jam-band paradox. “You tend to find a lot
of really good stuff when you’re out there exploring music. So if
you don’t go there, you’re never going to find
it.”

Groove Analysis

Moe. has been writing music for two decades, and in
that time they’ve mastered the art of the jam, creating memorable
songs evoking everything from modern pop to ’60s psychedelia that
have all the ingredients one expects from their genre; funky grooves,
good hooks, and lengthy guitar solos! Drummer Vinnie Amico brings much
of the funk to the band offering some unusually angular, unpredictable
grooves.

“Puebla”
This track features a
funky groove with an unusual hi-hat rhythm and a surprising snare note
played on the ah of 3. There’s not much ghosting
in the snare part so all the notes are played at a consistent volume.
The second line of the transcription shows a simpler groove that Amico
uses to let the rhythm breathe a bit. At the beginning of the guitar
solo he changes his groove a little by playing all the
&’s and ahs on his hi-hat and simplifies the
snare part.

DRUM! Notation Guide

“Rainshine”
For this song,
Amico plays another unusual pattern with a normal snare note on count
2 but then shifts to a syncopated rhythm that accents the
ah of 3 and the & of 4. The
second line begins with the tasty fill he uses to lead into the next
section, which is a bit reminiscent of the great yet underappreciated
’60s band Blind Faith. This part is played on the ride and uses a
Latin-flavored tumbao pattern that places the dominant pulses on 1
ah (2) & 3 ah (4) &. The last section of this excerpt has
offbeat snare and tom hits that do not follow the main guitar riff but
instead offer a more interesting and contrasting rhythmic counterpoint
to it. He ends this with a build into the guitar jam.

“Smoke”
For this melodic song,
Amico plays a simple pop groove that complements the tune. The
interesting stuff happens at the outro at 2:55. At this point a new
angular guitar riff in 7/4 occurs and unlike the previous song, this
time Amico plays the same rhythm on his snare and floor tom for a couple
of measures. From this he launches into an odd groove on his kit that
still suggests the rhythm guitar part while he adds subtle variations to
it as the song slowly fades.